Pathfinder: Circumscribing the Locust Part I

'I have been alive and dead and this and that and all at once. I have been a story in a thousand books.' -Grant Morrison, Seven Soldiers #1

Throngs of newly dead stared at the moon overhead, their gazes resolving the darker shades of silver into the faint image of a skull. The moon stared back, but its reaper's face seemed to have little regard for those frightened, disoriented figures looking upon it. Yet there was regard there. Consciousness. The moon was alive, the weightless touch of its light expressing a hollowness of deep starvation.

Many of the dead watched it warily, as if it might descend upon them as a ravenous meteor. One soul, it's black armor bearing great rents and blood stains, did not seem concerned at all by this possibility. It had barely spared the moon a glance, it's gaze instead running over the horizon spanning, sky kissing walls. The tops of these biege sandstone barriers were manned by clockwork centurions, behemoths, and centaurs guarding against an enemy the dead were far too low to see. These walls were covered with equations ever changing like the tracks of fauna shifting under a desert wind. This hypnotic calligraphy of mathematics were written so even the possibility of solutions required following the symbols to a great spire miles away from this arrival point of after death. Of course the dead were being herded in that direction regardless, though there were revelations - or at least poignant questions - in their immediate vicinity.

The armor clad figure reached out to touch the wall.

I can...I can see myself in this. The logic of the symbols seemed to mirror the ebon clad warrior in some manner, just before it was jostled forward by one of the clockwork giants whose jet skin mirrored the soul's platemail. Looking back at place on the wall that seemed to chart its being, there was no longer anything there but the formulas describing Creation.

And then another step as newer dead pushed against those who'd passed away moments before, moving all ever forward toward the Spire, herded like lambs toward their Day of Judgement.